The Palgrave Handbook of Christianity in Africa from Apostolic Times to the Present

This comprehensive Handbook provides chapter length surveys of the history of Christian missions and Christian churches on the African continent since the time of Christ. Africa is rapidly becoming the most Christianized region of the world. While common narratives about Christianity tend to present Christianity as a set of ideas and beliefs imposed on Africa from the outside, such narratives hold little meaning for African Christians or for those seeking to understand Christianity in Africa as an indigenous faith. The aim of the Handbook is to propose a set of scholarly starting points for a new set of narratives. The chapters collected here communicate an idea of Christianity as it has been embraced among African peoples at particular historical moments. It therefore grants voice to the various strands of African Christianity on their own terms, and offers scholarly study of what these voices teach us about how the world’s most adhered to religion is practiced and understood on the continent of Africa.

Andrew E. Barnes is Professor of History at Arizona State University, USA. He is the author of The Social Dimension of Piety: Associative Life and Religious Change in the Penitent Confraternities of Marseille 1499-1792 (1994), Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria (2009), and Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism and the Shaping of African Industrial Education (2017). Presently he is working on a monograph of the evolution of Ethiopianism among Christians of African descent across the Atlantic, 1780-1930.

Toyin Falola is University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.